U.S. Officials Question Detainee on Possible Role in 9/11 Attacks

The hunt for possible co-conspirators who worked with the 19 hijackers to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks -- and perhaps other Al Qaeda-inspired plots -- has found its way to the government’s own backyard.

Federal officials said Tuesday that they had been questioning a Saudi man detained at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to see whether he was in league with the hijackers.

The man is one of about a dozen suspected Al Qaeda operatives that officials have identified as possible participants in planning the attacks -- one of whom may even have been an intended “20th hijacker.” Theories about an unaccounted-for hijacker arose because the plane that struck the Pentagon and the two that hit the World Trade Center each had five terrorists aboard, while the jetliner that crashed in Pennsylvania carried just four.

The incarcerated Saudi -- whom officials identified only as “Al-Qahtani,” a common Middle Eastern name -- first attracted the interest of U.S. authorities in late August 2001 when he tried to enter the country through the Orlando, Fla., airport.

He was denied entry by a federal immigration inspector after giving vague answers to questions about his stay; months later, he was picked up in Afghanistan by U.S. troops and sent to Cuba, a law enforcement official said.

Al-Qahtani has now drawn renewed interest largely because of one tantalizing fact: Sept. 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta was caught on a security camera making a phone call from the same Orlando airport at about the same time that Al-Qahtani was being turned back. Officials are now trying to learn whether the two men were linked.

“We are looking at people who attempted to get here, and who fit the particular model of what the hijackers looked like,” the law enforcement official said. He called Al-Qahtani’s possible involvement in the attacks -- first reported in of Newsweek magazine -- “conjecture.”

The federal agent who stopped Al-Qahtani at the airport, Jose Melendez-Perez, a Bureau of Customs and Border Protection inspector with the Homeland Security Department, is scheduled to testify Monday before a U.S. panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

An investigation of the terrorist attacks by the House and Senate intelligence committees concluded last year that the hijackers were all in the U.S. no later than June 2001.

Theories about a possible 20th hijacker have continued to evolve over the last two years. The U.S. at one point ascribed that distinction to Zacarias Moussaoui, an acknowledged Al Qaeda loyalist who was picked up and detained in August 2001 on immigration charges after exhibiting suspicious behavior while attending a flight school in Minnesota.

Officials now believe that Moussaoui, who is in a Virginia jail awaiting trial on terrorism charges, was part of a conspiracy that included Sept. 11 but was not necessarily one of the intended hijackers.